NNKS

Why Listen to Plants?

This sound-based exhibition offers a plant-listening program, by artists from Australia and Scandinavia. It is a collaboration between Liquid Architecture and NNKS. Presented with The Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (LSAS).

Location

The gallery in Svolvær

From

31. Aug 2018

To

21. Oct 2018

Image: Jaye Carcary

Why Listen to Plants?

This sound-based exhibition offers a plant-listening program, by artists from Australia and Scandinavia from backgrounds including acoustic ecology, installation/visual art, performance and experimental music. Listeners are embedded in purpose-built mini greenhouses as they listen to sounds made by plants, sounds made with plants, and sounds made with plants’ listening pleasure in mind. (Link to full essay: Welcome to the Jungle)

This program is a collaboration and a conversation between Karolin Tampere and Danni Zuvela and between our respective organisations, NNKS and Liquid Architecture (LA). LA is an Australia organisation dedicated to artists working with sound and listening. Joel Stern is the co-Artistic Director of LA, and this program forms part of LA’s larger project Why Listen to Plants, taking place in Berlin, Lofoten, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Hepburn and Melbourne between August and December 2018. Why Listen to Plants builds on ideas first developed by Joel and Danni in LA’s 2016 program Why Listen to Animals. Both are part of LA’s larger ongoing investigation exploring non-human listening, Why Listen? Karolin Tampere and Danni Zuvela have worked together since 2017 when Karolin performed at LA’s Body Languages event. This exhibition is in a dialogue with the Lofoten Sound Art Symposium, organized by Karolin Tampere and Svein Ingvoll Pedersen, from 6-9 September 2018.

Lofoten Sound Art Symposium’s thematics and activities will primarily be informed by the participating artists’ practices. However, taking place in the surroundings of the Lofoten islands and taking a cue from the practice of some of the most interesting recent and ongoing work in the field of sound art, the program will have a special focus on sound and nature as a present and crucial, entry point. The landscape of Lofoten is widely known for its aesthetic qualities; images of its extraordinary surroundings are reproduced and distributed extensively. In parallel to this often romanticised, static image – of the human idea of wilderness – these archipelagos are places in transformation. These are grounds where the idea of nature, and various claims on it, are played out amidst the shifting forces of commercial fishing and tourism industries in uneasy co-existence with increasing interests in oil extraction. What is the sound of the sea-bed? What noise is concealed by the roar of wind, waves and water?

Curated by Danni Zuvela, with Karolin Tampere. Why Listen to Plants is presented with The Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (LSAS). The exhibition is part of Why Listen, which is an umbrella for a suite of other inves­ti­ga­tions by Liquid Architecture, includ­ing Why Listen to Ani­mals? (2016; 2019); 2018’s major inves­ti­ga­tion, Why Listen to Plants?, and more to come.

Liquid Archi­tec­ture is an Aus­tralian organ­i­sa­tion for artists work­ing with sound. LA inves­ti­gates the sounds them­selves, but also the ideas com­mu­ni­cated about, and the mean­ing of, sound and lis­ten­ing. Their pro­gram stages encoun­ters and cre­ates spaces for sonic expe­ri­ence, and crit­i­cal reflec­tion on sonor­ity and sys­tems of sonic affect. In conjunction with Lofoten Sound Art Symposium they have commissioned two new works by artists Nathan Gray and Makiko Yamamoto.